Donal Ryan: ‘I'm still learning about class in Ireland ... and the tribes that exist'

Irish Times

12 hours ago

Donal Ryan
had just been longlisted for the
Booker Prize
for his debut novel
The Spinning Heart
. So: he couldn't help himself. The jubilant author turned on his computer in 2013 and wrote an email pointing out this detail to the literary agent who had just issued him with a generic rejection to say she was not interested in representing him. 'She didn't reply. It was a pyrrhic victory for me,' Ryan laughs. Then a doubtful expression crosses his face. 'I shouldn't have bothered. I regret it.'
Humble and unpretentious by nature, Ryan has a habit of worrying about things he has said or done, even and perhaps especially at moments of greatest glory. We're talking today because the Tipperary-born author has added another trophy to his crowded mantelpiece:
the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
for his novel Heart,
Be at Peace
.
But Ryan looks anxious when he joins me on a video call from his books-strewn office in the
University of Limerick
, where he serves as a lecturer in creative writing. It's partly because of the attention now coming his way.
'I find interviews so hard,' he says. 'After this interview is finished, I'll be worried and feel sick and find it hard to sleep.' Does a monologue play out in his head about what he's doing right or wrong? 'It never stops,' Ryan nods. 'Some days I look forward to being asleep so I can make it stop.'
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If Ryan (49) is a fretter, so too are his remarkable, profound characters. Heavy emotions play out in the interior lives of Ryan's fictional creations: shame, grief, anger loom large, along with a desire to tell the truth. Whether it's lonely, bewildered Johnsey in The Thing About December or fragile, observant Lampy in From a Low and Quiet Sea, there's a ring of flinty authenticity to them and a captivating poetry.
Ryan suffered through 47 rejections before he succeeded in getting The Spinning Heart published in 2012, but once it was in the world, readers recognised it for what it was: a book containing deep truths.
Where other Irish authors had been setting their fiction back through the decades, perhaps to avoid the inchoate mess of the Celtic Tiger boom-to-bust, Ryan, based in Castletroy in Limerick, shone his torchlight directly on to the subject of what Irish banks did to Irish people. Narrated via 21 perspectives in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, characters offered insights about what it felt like to live on ghost estates; to buckle beneath the weight of crippling mortgages and uncertain futures. The book was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian First Book Award.
Its sequel, Heart, Be at Peace, which returns us to their lives a decade on, has already won
Novel of the Year
at the 2024 Irish Book Awards and now, in netting the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, has triumphed over books from authors including
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(Dream Count), Robert Harris (Precipice) and Elif Shafak (There are Rivers in the Sky).
Until recently, you would have to look into dark corners to see drug dealing. Now it's very open. Close to my house there are dealers operating
Ryan is grateful to win awards but he struggles with them too. 'They're weird, awards, because if you win, you feel a bit guilty for winning,' he says. 'If you win an award, it means other people on the shortlist have to not win it. Some of them are far more politically astute and engaged than I am.
Elif Shafak
is an amazing writer; she's been on trial in Turkey – she has suffered, she has been persecuted by her own government for her art. Elif is writing fiction at great personal risk.
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Donal Ryan: 'Stop apologising for yourself,' is one of the last things my mother said to me
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'I'm lucky enough to live in this lovely free country where you can express yourself for the most part without fear of censure or arrest. I've never lived anywhere except north Tipp and east Limerick, Limerick city. So in one way, I'm the last person who should be writing fiction that has any kind of universal effect. But the thing is, I do believe that no matter how specific a demotic voice is, the way people think about themselves and the world around them doesn't vary much. What's generated from within us is similar for all human beings.' He adds: 'I suppose it's true that as
Toni Morrison
says, all art is political.'
Sometimes the political act is to draw attention to invisibility. When Ryan began publishing, he tapped into a vein of Irish life that was both instantly recognisable and markedly different – these were characters so familiar you'd half-expect to step outside your house and spot them and yet they seemed to barely exist elsewhere in Irish fiction. 'When I first sat down to write The Spinning Heart, I just had Irish rural working people in mind. That's never gone away,' he says. 'They're the background and foreground of everything I do. That's who I am myself. I speak to my own people all the time, at the back of my head.'
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Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan: 'Companion' novel to The Spinning Heart is a welcome return
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Growing up in Tipperary, Ryan wasn't conscious of class divisions. He had an idyllic childhood with his parents and brother and sister in the village of Newtown.
'It was paradise,' he says. 'There was fun contained in every blade of grass. Everybody seemed to chat all the time. And everybody seemed to do the same kinds of jobs. All the dads were plumbers and labourers and carpenters. I wouldn't have known the word egalitarian, but it seemed to me that everybody where I grew up was the same. I think that's why class is portrayed starkly in my fiction, because I was shocked into such a keen awareness of it. I'm still learning as I go along about class in Ireland, the class system and the various tribes that exist.'
Author Donal Ryan: 'They're weird, awards, because if you win, you feel a bit guilty for winning.' Photograph: Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images
Before he became a prize-winning novelist in his 30s, Ryan was a labour inspector for the National Employment Rights Authority, where he was tasked with investigating regulatory offences by employers. What he found made him deeply aware of the gaps and inequities in the system, and how people could so easily become trapped by their circumstances.
'We used to visit language schools [in Ireland] advertising in Bangladesh for people to come and pay €2,000 for stamping their visa and an enrolment in a college. There'd be a few PCs and empty rooms and a couple of people hanging around who were meant to be lecturers. It was incredible. But nobody was breaking the law. They'd say, 'Oh the students are on a day off today or it's a holiday week.''
It's a scene revisited in Heart, Be at Peace, when one of the characters, Pokey Burke, is involved in setting up a dubious language school in Limerick city. Pokey is also involved in the drug scene and as he rises, other characters falter, worn down from debts, poor decision-making or the whiplash of negative social bias. 'People think they know the worth of your soul because of your clothes or bearing, these sudden judgments. We all do it.'
It's part of the hidden Ireland Ryan keeps lifting a stone to examine. 'Until recently, you would have to look into dark corners to see drug dealing. Now it's very open. Close to my house there are dealers operating,' he says.
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What do Irish writers read? Donal Ryan, Mark Tighe, Nuala O'Connor, Claire Hennessy and more give recommendations
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It was Ryan's mother Anne who inspired him to write the sequel to The Spinning Heart. She had worked in Tesco in Nenagh and would sit on the till fielding questions about The Spinning Heart to customers anxious to find out what happened to characters like Pokey Burke and Bobby Mahon. They'd even get her to autograph the book. She died in 2023, after a diagnosis of breast cancer, six years after the sudden death of his father. Their deaths have hit Ryan hard. 'You realise how much you need them,' he says.
'How much you need that beautiful anchor, that lovely, predictable heaviness at the backbone of your life. I expected them to be there until 100, to have these two people in my life. My mam was only 71. It didn't feel like it was her time to die. She had so much to say and she was so full of energy and love.'
His new novel, his ninth book, which he is just finishing, deals with grief. 'It's about a young man who loses his parents. It centres on that young lad's emotions and how grief affects him. When you don't confront grief properly, it can have strange effects on your psyche and your being, sometimes in a literal way, like on your skin or that sudden sweaty panic. The so-called ordinary loss, the loss of your parents, still has this terrible effect on you. And sometimes a discovery about a person you love, something you didn't know about them, can have the most profound, earth-shattering effect, so I explore those elements in the novel.'
Ryan has drawn immense comfort from his wife Anne Marie, his most dedicated reader, who has suffered serious health issues. How is she doing? 'She's great. She's been through so much. She's had cancer twice. She really got beaten down the second time. Chemo is so hard. She's come through it. She's so positive.'
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Donal Ryan short story: 'He turned away from the beast, but the smell of death remained'
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Ryan met Anne Marie on a picket line when he was 28, when both were trade union activists with the Civil Public and Services Union. She encouraged him to pursue his dream of writing fiction, she would chase him up the stairs to write. So much stems from Anne Marie; her faith, her encouragement, her ability to delicately critique his work. 'Everything is written with her in mind. She's my first reader.'
Anne Marie may soon need to give their teenage children Thomas and Lucy important tips about Ryan's fiction. 'The Spinning Heart is back on the Leaving Cert syllabus just in time for Thomas to have to do it for the Leaving Cert,' the author says. 'The poor créatúr. I don't know whether or not that'll encourage him into a writing career.'
If either of his children opt for that route, they may find one day themselves facing their father in the University of Limerick in his role as a creative writing lecturer, where he does his best to encourage his students, who are 'on thin emotional ice' to keep their faith in themselves. As spells-maker Lily puts it in Heart, Be at Peace: 'Belief itself is a kind of magic. You can do things that seem impossible if you believe truly and with your whole heart.'
Ryan offers a smile when I quote the lines back at him. You get the impression it's a sentiment he has carried with him his whole life, and which nourishes him even during those times, like now, when he finds the sideshow of publicity or the fear of judgment by others stressful.
'There's no way of patrolling how people interpret what you say and how people receive your work,' he says. 'You issue a blank contract when you write something, and the terms can't be negotiated or dictated by you. All you can do is tell your story the best way you can.'